Night ringer (Esmee POV)

Night ringer

Esmee

Night shifts where usually non eventful things, that involved sitting on a chair reading, trying unsuccessfully to open doors and shine a torch into someone’s face so you could check on them without waking them up, writing notes and spending a few hours in a hot room of monitors so you could keep a constant eye on anyone in the high dependency rooms. For this reason alone Emmet and I had swapped the shifts to give me an easy time after my slip up however sometimes the unit just had it in for you. Or the world was in for someone else and you had to share their Burden. 

The night had not started well.  I wasn’t sure whether it was excitement of nerves that made me take the grainy picture of my 12 week scan into show Mi. I had none of course that it was going to affect her strongly. I knew her pain. I had felt it before. I had watched teary eyed and angry as the people from my school grew bumps over the weeks and then pushed expensive prams up the street with the most beautiful baby inside. It ripped you apart from the inside out to look down and see an empty place where something had once grown but had let go too soon. What was worse was Mi was heavily pregnant.  The baby was a week away from potentially viable and notes said he had been born breathing in a puddle of blood on the floor. My pregnancy was going to hit her hard – harder then I could have imagined and I knew the words that would be going around her head that she hated but felt so strongly when she was greeted with the news because I had felt then so intently as well – It’s not fair, it should have been me.

I had broken her and said some stupid thing about importance when she was mentioning her baby. In my desperation I broke unit rules and took an exercise addict running to try and calm her down and almost lost her altogether. It was only my semi melt down that turned it around. She had discovered that cut on my arm from where I had lost control and it broke me. It was never nice to feel so much like a client in a place like Apple gate even if you where the staff.

It was 12am when Mi went to sleep exhausted and she was the last one out of all the clients meaning the rest of the night should have been a case of sitting in the nurses’ station and checking on people. Rainy and Conner where on ambers and Mi was still on red so I had a few hours where I had to sit in the doorway of their rooms and watch them sleep and AJ, Summer, and Mark where on green intermittent checks and I had an hour another two hours that where going to be up and down a lot so I could get to them every five to ten minutes. There was no one in the ECA’s so CCTV didn’t need manning unless there was a crisis which was good because Jacob hadn’t turned up to work and he hand not phoned in sick to give an explanation so we were a member of  staff down. It was going to be fairly normal if a not less busy and time for less nose in book but it was easy work really and I had it under control.

Then at 1am the office phone rang.